Fairyland

Namaste,

The Electric Fairy waved her magic wand. All the lights in Nepal went out.  
Ha, ha laughed the Electric Fairy.

A business man with an Olive food joint in a small tourist town near a lake below Annapurna crammed with:

18,543 restaurants,
69.306 money changers,
456 trek clothing stores,
283 travel agents,
32 adventure companies,
19 boarding schools,

8,032 comatose, dulled out, dumbed down students
dreaming of better Indian educational/employment futures

27 female Tibetan refugees selling their recycled sidewalk dreams,
401 guesthouses,
8 dance halls,
1 jazz club,

3 supermarkets,
numerous mom & pop shoe string ops,

52 barber/massage shops,
9 bookstores,
6 bakeries,
85 wandering oxen,
3 tailors,
2 shoe repair experts,
1,208 anxious lost tourists,

and 50,001 bored residents with very short economic attention spans said,
I will buy a $15,000 gas generator to solve this energy conundrum. 

When it ran out of gas the Electric Fairy laughed ha, ha, ha. Now you see it, now you don't.

Metta.

Nature

Greetings,

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is an awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic lesson in natural laws. Magma at work. Do not disturb. Nature is a wonderful teacher. Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. This is natural selection.

Simple as that. Nature said, Unfortunately for all living species, I have no agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, commerce, economy, plan, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

I have a free pass. I have total power. I am unpredictable. I am violent and I am benign. I am gentle, kind and generous. I giveth and I taketh away. Humans will never, with their severely limited intelligence control me, manipulate me or own me. I have vast powers. I create and I destroy. That's my Nature.

Some humans call me Shiva, the Auspicious One. I am the destroyer of life. Fire is my source of power.

Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Lord of Time.

Humans are naturally naive. Naivety and stupidity and laziness is their Nature. They don't listen or pay attention to Nature until it, for example, shifts the plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake. The natural result is loss of life in Sichuan because shoddy buildings built by greedy humans all fall down smashing 10,000 children. 

Humans use fire to cremate bodies because there are not enough vultures to eat the remains. 

Japan is another example of my power.

Ash, on the other hand, a buy product of Nature goes with the flow.

Metta.

The Chinese Virus

Greetings,

Before floating south to Pakse and the Mekong toward Cambodia here's a summary of the northern visions. 

Buon Tay is a small dusty town two hours south of Phongsali on a narrow red dirt silver stone road flanked by rising thick forests. Oudomxai, a large Lao-Chinese town five hours south is a real Chinese mess.

High remote Lao villages and harvested rice terraces lead toward Luang Prabang. Disneyland East.

The Chinese are invading Laos. In masse. It's a virus.

The geographical borders (Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) and incessant rampant anxious desire for money, exploitation and natural resources (timber and minerals) dancing with political, economic influence and cheap labor drives the Chinese engine. Hello Big Brother. 

Buon Tay is one example of the new wild west filled with Chinese guesthouses, restaurants, billboards, CCTV television programs, black diesel belching ubiquitous blue Chinese dump trucks filled with dirt and Yunnan workers.

Factories (cheap clothing & construction) sprout like mushrooms. Crowds of ill-mannered loud rude Chinese idiots rule. Drunken men sing, "We are the world. Long live socialist ideology and economic profit."

Groups of Chinese construction workers in track suits received plastic bags filled with cartons of cheap cigarettes as partial payment for their socialist sacrifice and backbreaking toil. They trudge dusty roads near green mountains back to their makeshift tin shacks. They are the new immigrants. They build roads and hammer and shovel and carry and slave to create hard nosed businesses. It reminds me of poor Maija village near a business university in Fujian.

The Lao markets are filled with Chinese goods: beer, juice, disposable plastic consumables. 

A wealthy Chinese man with a gold watch, leather bag and dress shoes goes to the market. His sour dull depressed looking wife handles the money. She makes all the economic decisions. She buys some meat - a luxury only they can afford.

Lao women spread their luscious green vegetables on banana leaves. They arrive, chat with friends, sell, leave leaves and return home to grow more food. Shallow stranded immigrants wander around staring at onions, lettuce, cabbages, cuts of meat. They are poor. The lost desperate starving dull eyed Chinese workers traverse sparrow songs, passing recycled garbage, sleeping dogs, and industrial dump trucks spewing glorious growth potentials inside shrouds of mountain mist. 

Lao laugh and smile. They've seen fools come and go. They know these fools will stay, breed and take over.

No exit.

Metta.

yes dear father

greetings,

i was busy playing my new and improved hyper passive-aggressive violent video game about a country that's been divided and at war since 1955. the south part is rich. the north is poor. they rely on Big Brother for money and food and stuff like chopsticks. someone called. your father wants to see you. now.

his office is a big office. so big in fact you need to take a golf cart from the door, across the shiny diamond inlaid mosaic floor past 1.5 million bowing palace people to reach his desk. his desk is made of recycled high grade uraninum 235. it glows in the dark. this is amazing because few if any buildings have electricity.

my bored aunt and uncle reclined in plush mauve leather chairs. they were watching the dynasty soap opera.

son, he said, sit down. that's an order.

yes father dear, oh great leader of the people. cut the crap son, we have important matters to preview. as you know the party congress circus is in town for the big show. feeding five million people at a state dinner gives me a nuclear headache. the fission potential is a beautiful mess.

yes, i said, i saw them getting off the special train and walking through the reception hall like robots. it was amazing. they were all wearing the same ill fitting suits and carrying a black briefcase. it reminded me of matrix. or the day the earth stood still.

they were marching toward the toilet. 

yes son, everyone marches to the beat of my drum solo.

a servant approached with myopic glasses of bubbly on a silver tray.

son, i propose a toast. today is the day i make you a four-star general. i created you 27 years ago and today i make you famous and powerful. you are a rising star in our isolated universe. you are like me. you have demonstrated the personality, the drive, the ambition, the arrogance and the ruthless qualities i respect and admire in a human being. so, you get to be a general. drink up!

wow, thanks dad. what do i have to do? smile, shake hands, tell people what to do and pretend to be exactly who you are. in control. image is everything.

metta.

No education, no chance

Greetings,

Editor’s note: this entry contains material which may not be suitable for children under 100.

It is 6:00 a.m. It is raining. Rain is not part of this short tale. It’s only purpose is to clean the air, turn dusty red rutted ragged roads into quagmires and provide essential moisture to roots.

It is important, gentle reader to understand the context. I have written extensively about the reality here on the ground the last eight months. Unpleasant facts are more plentiful than health care, education or clean drinking water. See Travel Tales for material.

Some Cambodian people, like other people on planet Earth are cunning, devious and scheming. They, like others, have little or no formal education for various reasons. 

For many impoverished adults on Earth educating their children 

wastes time and m-o-n-e-y.

Food is their daily priority.

This means many mill around, stare, interrupt others, are rude, do not LISTEN and demonstrate behavior and attitudes similar to simians with a very limited vocabulary.

Their daily existence involves searching, finding, preparing and eating food. It involves searching, finding and having sex. It involves sleeping. Sleeping is popular before, during and after food. 

Sex is popular whenever the male, the ALPHA animal in the tribe demands it. This is Natural Selection. People live on Earth for two main reasons: to breed and to work. Read and write? No, breed and work. 

Female members are Passive. They are conditioned through DNA genetics and environment and family education and expectations to be Passive. 

If they refuse to submit to the male they are beaten. If they talk about it they are beaten. If they enjoy it they are beaten. If they run away they are captured and beaten. If they suffer humiliation they are beaten. If they are beaten they are beaten. If they live to tell the tale they are beaten. If they die while being beaten their corpse is beaten. They are beat.

In Afghanistan they are stoned to death by members of their Taliban community. 

She was 19. He was 25.

However, females display acts of aggression when they perceive their offspring (and they have 100’s) are in danger. The longer she breeds the longer she lives, the longer she works the longer she lives. In theory.

Their main task in life is to breed and work. Then they are slaughtered. Life is a bitch.

Across the rural street from my little space behind a green garden I am a witness. I extrapolate, illuminate, illustrate, and desiccate. A family has moved into a long shack across the street where they live. They set up a food joint. They sell steamed corn and fast fried foods.

There is a mother, two older boys 17 & 20 and two girls, the youngest is about 13. The girls may belong to the mother or, as is common, they're from poor areas needing domestic work. They are highly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

No papa. He is history in the tragic family tale, one of millions throughout the Magic Kingdom. Long gone in the long now. 

Incest Is Best, a boy about 17, touches one girl’s rear while mom is at the market. He’s wearing his towel-sarong. She’s setting up a glass display case on a wooden counter with her back toward him. He slides up behind her and presses his crotch against her. 

She freezes. He imitates sexual movement. He whispers to her, Little ‘sister,’ this is what happens to you. I have a little red rooster. Do you like it? 

She is powerless. She has to stand there and take it. She is silent. She feels like crying.

Rule #1. Boys and men run the show. They pay lip service to girls and women. It’s the old breed and work paradigm. 

Sexual harassment by immature boys and older men (with money, power and control) and a high level of testosterone, IS a game. Simple sex. No education. No responsibility. No morals. No ethics. No education. 

This explains why millions of girls have babies and the guy runs away. Zero responsibility. 

Girls and women tolerate it because:

it’s an unpleasant hard, cold cruel fact of life

they are told to submit to males
they live in Fear 
they are considered stupid and second class citizens
they have no human rights
it’s an unpleasant reality here
it’s the LAW of the jungle
it’s expected
they have no Voice, no way out
they don’t have the power to say or do anything to stop it
mother is not sympathetic. it happened to her. that’s life

(Translated by Rain)

Metta.